1. Field
The aspects of the disclosed embodiments generally relate to tracking mobile communication devices.
2. Brief Description of Related Developments
Mobile phones have converged for some time towards computers. Various modern mobile phones are capable of using the internet, maintaining a calendar synchronized with an office system and presenting mail attachment files in common office program formats such as presentations, word processor and spreadsheet application formats. Such modern phones differ from Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) mainly by providing mobile telecommunications connectivity. As such, the modern phones used in business often contain confidential and sensitive information. However, even modern smart phones are relatively inexpensive and they become quickly outdated due to the fast progress in this technical field. The old phones have little commercial value for their owners as equipment even though the value of the information they contain may be substantial, at least the cost to business of losing their sensitive information may be significant. Understandably old smart phones are often relocated within a company in which they were owned or even out of the company to relatives and friends of intended users. Before handing over a smart phone to a friend or relative, employees seldom perform adequate clearing of sensitive data so that the information is certainly not recoverable. This risk that a phone is handed over to another person by its user becomes the higher the longer the phone has been out of daily use.
Modern phones are also capable of executing third party applications. The capability to run third party applications enables a host of new features and services. Unfortunately, ability to run third party applications may enable malicious or erroneous applications to endanger the data security of the phone. For instance, a badly behaving application might expose user data, email messages or calendar entries to other people either over short range connections such as Bluetooth or in the worst case by sharing or allowing access to the data over the internet. While it is impossible to anticipate dangerous applications before they are created, it may be possible to adapt the operating system of the mobile phone to prevent operation of some applications that are known to risk information security. For private phone owners, it is up to each owner how to act when new information security risks arise and operating system updates become available. For large organizations, it may be impossible or too onerous to monitor their entire base of currently used mobile phones. Hence, even if an organization should update certain mobile equipment, it may require undue amount of manual work to determine those phones that should be subjected to the update.
the aspects of the disclosed embodiments advantageously avoid and/or mitigate the problems associated with the prior art.